“And not being married, you, well—in point of fact, you can’t know. A man, especially as he gets on in years, has to make concessions to his wife. All life is compromise, as you know, and married life in particular. A certain happiness, or, at any rate, peace, must be secured, and compromise is the highroad to it—in fact, the only road. But it is absurd for me to be saying all this, because of course you know Lady Fergusson.” I knew her well, but I knew also that in that _ménage_ the grey mare was not the better animal; it was Sir Edmund who ruled, and any compromise that was made came from his wife’s side. He may suddenly have been aware that some such thoughts were passing in my mind, for he added, not without a slight flush, “Of course, you have not seen her lately”—as though during the few months of our estrangement both her character and his own had undergone one of those changes that happen only in tracts and fairy tales. He even had the hardihood to add, “You’ll notice a great difference when,” but stumbled over it and went on quickly—“that is, if you ever honour us by your company again, as I most cordially hope you will. “For,” he continued more fluently, “it is about that that I have come; about that, and our letter to you, which I have been regretting ever since it was sent. What I want to make clear—without any disloyalty, mind, to Lady Fergusson—is that that letter was written when we were in a highly nervous state and was written almost wholly at her Ladyship’s wish. You recall what I said about compromise? “Well, my dear doctor,” he said, “my dear Greville, if you will permit me to call you that once more—for the sake of harmony, for the sake of that peace which must dominate a home, I consented to write that letter and to do many other things which were a natural consequence of it. When your reply came, I recognized the good sense of it at once; I knew, as any man of the world must know, that my poor boy cannot be wholly absolved, that it takes two to make an elopement no less than a marriage. I knew—but women have not our penetration and common reasonableness, our sagacity, shall I say? “Lady Fergusson,” he continued, “could not take that view, and compromise made me, in that moment of stress and disaster, when the Hall and all it stood for seemed to be toppling about us like a house of cards, compromise made me as wax in her hands. “I have come now, in humility and shame, to apologize for my share of this most lamentable quarrel, and to ask you, for the sake of my poor wife, to overlook it, to forget it, and once more to show your magnanimity by coming to the Hall and doing something to relieve that poor distraught creature’s pain. “I ask nothing for myself,” he concluded. “I merely grovel. But for her sake you will come, won’t you? No one knows her symptoms as you do. In no one has she such confidence.”